For anyone who doesn’t have any interest in coding from scratch but wants to join the shift away from table based web design and get into Cascading Style Sheets, CSS Tab Designer provides the ideal solution. What you get is a simple interface, with a selection of templates from which to make basic, functional tabbed navigation for your web site. If you expect anything more however, prepare to be disappointed.

When you first open this program, you can check out a sample project, which is a really quick way to play with it and learn what you can do. For the majority of people a quick edit of the IDs is all they will need to be ready to upload to their site. If you decide to start from scratch, you soon reach the point where you’re ready to publish the code, although on the way you may notice the lack of any undo feature or that you can’t “save as”, which makes saving variations more complicated.

Neither of these should upset anyone too much, but one thing that got under our skin was the lack of customization options. CSS Tab Designer doesn’t provide any means by which users can design their own tabs, nor does it even allow you to go in and edit the generated code if you have images and would like to apply them to the same template. In this case you’ve got to open a separate program, such as notepad, and edit the code to point to your own images.

Evidently this software has been designed for beginners, but since it’s free and generates light and easily editable CSS code, it may be of use to anyone working on a web site.